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With several Gigawatts of PV (PhotoVoltaic) installations, huge amount of time series dataWith several Gigawatts of PV (PhotoVoltaic) installations, huge amount of time series datafrom Solar PV plants such as meteorological data, string level measurements, transmissionloss & generations data are collected. Such lengthy time series data from solar PV plantsare no doubt highly multi-dimensional and challenging to process, but the bigger problemis getting clean data from various sensors in this case Combiner boxes, Inverters, MFMs(Multi-Functional Meters) & WMS (Weather Monitoring Station). That’s where Majority ofthe existing SCADA (Solar Control And Data Acquisition) systems are failing!

Internet of Things (IoT) provides a technological platform to achieve this with its abilityto gather data from Anything or Everything connected over network. Emergence of thistechnology will prove to be a significant differentiator in this race by providing access tothe plant remotely, thus increase the productivity and maximize Return of Investment.

APIC (Avi on Premise IoT Controller) series Intelligent Datalogger, in-house built & usesreal-time analytics and artificial intelligence to enhance operational performance ofsolar power plants. Most solar PV plants are in remote locations and may have a verylow bandwidth internet connectivity. Existing sensors or specialized sensors placed atcritical points in Solar plants, monitors parameters including temperature, DC power, ACpower, Voltage, Current, Faults etc. Sensors which are part of a SCADA system collects,consolidates & logs all the data of a Plant. Hence, to ensure real time monitoring of theplant, critical data is packetized using special algorithms and pushed to a cloud server.Cloud Server gives the flexibility of preserving/Maintaining huge volume, velocity of plant’s historical data. The data is also stored at local control room and can be retrievedin case of communication failure with Cloud Server, thus ensuring reliable and accuratedata availability.

Data Collection at the solar plant can be achieved by three ways by deploying APIC seriesIntelligent Datalogger/ Smart Sensors.

1. Wireless Remote monitoring SCADA:

Here the data from the inverters (Central/string),MFMs, VCBs(Voltage Circuit Breaker) or any other device at plant with Modbus RTU/TCPinterface can be collected by APIC-RTU/TCP (Remoter Termination Unit / TransmissionControl Protocol).Concentrator unit (APIC-RF) which is located at MCR which sends request & collects datafrom RF slaves [ASN] installed at field on various devices (Eg: String Combiner boxes).

This received data will be processed and pushed toThis received data will be processed and pushed toCloud server through a secured protocol using GPRStechnology. We can optionally route the collected datato a Local SCADA system as well.

2. Wired SCADA:

In this method, all the devices whichare to be monitored are connected through cables(OFC/Ethernet) till the Main Control Room and theplant data can be monitored in control room PC.The APIC -intelligent datalogger, installed in MCRwhich collects, process and sends to cloud serverthrough a secured protocol using GPRS technology.

3. Third party SCADA Integration:

It can be achieved in three ways:

1) Push Method: In this method, Avi Solar will setupFTP server and provide login credentials to Third Party SCADA vendor. The Third-Party SCADA vendor should PUSH plants data to FTP server in near Realtime. The format ofthe Data should either in CSV (Comma Separated Value) or JSON (Java Script ObjectNotation) format. This data will be read and stored in our cloud servers.

2) Pull Method /API: We will call third party Scada APIs for the extraction of data forthe particular plant (Avi Solar will PULL Data by making calls to Third-Party REST(Representational state transfer) API. The Third-party SCADA vendor should provideREST API’s credentials to Avi Solar for pulling data.

3) Scripting: In this method using the client credentials we can run the software on client’scomputer (Scripting) and extract the data/download the data automatically every 5min intervals from the existing Web Based SCADA software.”APIC series has currently 3+ Intelligent Datalogger/Smart SensorDifferent Variants: -